Rate My Professor Devesh Ranjan

Devesh Ranjan served as the Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair and Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 2022 until his departure in 2025. He earned a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology-Trichy in 2003, an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005, and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007. His early career included a postdoctoral position and Director’s Research Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2008, followed by serving as Morris E. Foster Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University from 2009 to 2014. Joining Georgia Tech in 2014, he progressed to Associate Professor and then full Professor, holding endowed positions such as the J. Erskine Love Jr. Faculty Fellow and Ring Family Chair. He also served as Associate Chair for Research, Interim Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research in 2021, and co-chair of the hypersonics task force.

Ranjan's research specializes in experimental and computational studies of multiphase flow, heat transfer phenomena, hydrodynamic instabilities, turbulent mixing in extreme conditions like supersonic and hypersonic flows, and applications in energy systems and power conversion. He directed the Shock Tube and Advanced Mixing Laboratory and co-directed the Department of Defense-funded University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics. His research group produced over 100 peer-reviewed publications, including 'Dynamics of buoyancy driven flows at moderately high Atwood numbers' (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2016), 'The effect of initial conditions and circulation deposition on the inclined-interface reshocked Richtmyer-Meshkov instability' (Experiments in Fluids, 2015), and 'Simultaneous velocity and density measurements of fully developed Rayleigh-Taylor mixing' (Physical Review Fluids, 2021). Ranjan received major awards such as the 2023 ASME Gustus L. Larson Memorial Award, ASME Fellowship, Department of Energy Early Career Award, NSF CAREER Award, and U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award. He earned teaching honors including Provost Teaching and Learning Fellow and Governor’s Teaching Fellow, and contributed editorially to Shock Waves and ASME Journal of Fluids Engineering.